2014/04/15 Belarus takes steps to share environmental data

“Belarus is interested in EU developments in the environmental field and aims to be fully compliant on its reporting obligations”,- stated Mr. Vitaliy Kulyk, Deputy Minister of Natural Resources and Environmental Protection at the national ENPI-SEIS workshop, held in Minsk on the 19-20 February 2014. A primary aim of the workshop, which gathered stakeholders working with the production, management and sharing of environmental data, was to help overcome organisational, administrative and technical constraints to allow open access and sharing of national datasets.

The outcome of the workshop shows that data underpinning the selected core set of 8 regional indicators (air, water quality, waste and biodiversity) are available, at various levels of quality. The infrastructure to manage environmental data in the Republic of Belarus is in place and operational (i.e. Centres, digital databases). Nevertheless, a lack of human and financial resources is considered as obstacle to advance in this area.

The Republic of Belarus established the National Environmental Monitoring System (hereinafter - NEMS), of which the activities are coordinated by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Protection. One of the areas of implementation of NEMS is to provide compatibility with international information systems in the field of environmental monitoring. NEMS includes a Main Information and Analytical Centre - which receives data from 11 organizationally independent types of monitoring: ambient air, surface water, ground water, land (soil), forests, flora, fauna, the ozone layer, geophysical monitoring, radiation monitoring and local monitoring.

On 15th April 2014 the European Environment Agency and the Government of the Republic of Belarus signed the statement of the meeting, which from one side commits the Republic of Belarus to improve the access to environmental information, and from the other - calls upon the EEA to share its expertise built on best practice from the Eionet and its data reporting mechanisms and tools .